For Puppies and Christmas
by peroxidepest17
Summary: When you fight like a spy, civilians don't stand a chance.


**Title:** For Puppies and Christmas  
** Universe:** Burn Notice  
**Theme/Topic: **N/A  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Character/Pairing/s:** Michael, Fiona, Sam, Jesse, Madeline, Nate (requisite mentions of MichaelxFiona)  
**Spoilers/Warnings:** Through 5x03  
**Word Count:** 3,275  
**Summary:** When you fight like a spy, civilians don't stand a chance.  
**Dedication:** for re_white and yuletide 2011! Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy this!  
**A/N:** I have not written Burn Notice in about a year and a half. I am also not caught up on S5 just yet so forgive me if there are any inconsistencies. Special thanks to Karen for the last-minute beta.  
**Disclaimer:**No harm or infringement intended.

* * *

When you're a spy, there's a fine line between using your abilities to help regular people out and using them on regular people for personal gain because it's easy and convenient.

You'd think the line wouldn't be fine by definition, especially given the widely differing parameters of each of the aforementioned sides of the line. But in a world where spies are constantly forced to identify, study, and utilize whatever advantages they have—or weaknesses their opponents show—in order to achieve their objectives, it's really a much narrower a margin than you might imagine.

Most spies know what they do isn't for glory or wealth or personal advantage. They go into, and, if they're lucky, sometimes even come out of, the job hoping to better the lives of the people around them. The normal, happy people who worry about how their fantasy football league is doing or whether or not their boss will give them that two week vacation window they really want so they can go on a cruise to the Caribbean at a bargain rate. Most spies do the work they do and use the training and knowledge they gain on the job in order to protect that way of life for regular people, because those ideals are all things spies desperately want but are resigned to never have for themselves. It's like looking through an animal shelter window and watching adorable puppies playing in the shredded newspaper. It's all well and fine to look at the puppies, but when you're a spy, you have to know that you can't actually take one of those puppies home with you at the end of the day, because you won't be around enough to feed and walk the puppy and it will grow up feral and angry from neglect.

But that doesn't mean no one else should have the puppy.

Michael likes to think of himself as the kind of spy who watches the puppies play in the shredded newspaper through the animal shelter window and instead of getting angry that he can't have a puppy like everyone else, hopes that someone nice will get to take the puppy home with them. Then he goes and does his job, which usually consists of hunting down and stringing up the animal abuser who had tried to starve/shoot/beat/cut/burn the puppies to death before they got sent to the animal shelter in the first place. This is a long and winding metaphor, but at the meat of it, all it means is that spies need to use their powers for good and not evil. For puppies.

And while he knows a lot of spies who fit into this category nicely (like Jesse or Lucy or Pierce), he also knows a lot of people who _don't_ as well.

They would be, for lack of a better term, the puppy abusers.

And the thing about it is, the transformation from one to the other is never startling or abrupt. It's the sort of festering wound that takes years and years to cultivate, turning sicklier and more rotten over time until the infection goes all the way through and it's too late to medicate. A lot of the time, the only antibiotic that works for this kind of illness is a bullet to the head. Or several, if you want to be thorough.

It begins when spies stop seeing civilians as people—people with lives and families and dreams and puppies— and start seeing them as mindless cattle tromping aimlessly through the field of life without a care in the world. It stirs something in a spy to see people living so simply and happily, particularly for those spies who have been tortured and isolated, who have had to murder like monsters for the greater good. After that inkling of discontent sets in, the inherent need to manipulate and conquer those weaker than them might (and usually does) strike next. Quite frankly, it's because that's what spies are trained to do. Larry is a prime example of this. He, like Michael, had been taught how to get around the system for the good of his country, and later, after all that training and suffering and thankless labor, Larry came to realize his country was _mostly_ made up of people similar to the poor schmucks he was working against in the first place (only much more trusting and therefore easier to manipulate and conquer). Larry soon came to the natural conclusion that he could use the same getting-around-the-system skills he'd learned in the service of his country in the service of himself instead, especially since spies versus civilians is a lot like watching semi-automatic machine guns versus blow darts on the evolutionary chain of weaponry.

The outstanding philosophy of the kinds of spies who cross the line is Darwinian at its simplest: the weak deserve to be killed off so the strong can survive. Spies just happen to be stronger than your average fantasy-football-playing, Caribbean-cruise-taking, puppy-adopting Joe Schmoe off the Miami streets.

In short, crossing that line we were talking about earlier usually means that you, as a spy, have gone power crazy. In which case, the CIA or the NSA (or whichever acronym whose jurisdiction you fall under) will send out other people trained in the same arts of getting-around-the-system in the hopes that they will be better at it than you are and less easy to convince to freelance than you were.

Michael's been that guy before, more times than he wanted to be. He's hunted former friends and colleagues who have tiptoed across, swayed back and forth over, or taken a giant flying nose dive over the line. From his experiences, he knows enough about where the line is and what the other side looks like to keep to where he belongs.

Well, most of the time, anyway.

Because occasionally—and this is very occasionally—a spy gets desperate. And when you're desperate enough, when enough is at stake, you do whatever it takes to get your mission done and think about the costs later.

It's not an excuse and it's not justification. It's just that sometimes, all there is, all you can do, is take a brief foray to the dark side for the greater good and hope that afterwards, when all is said and done, you can still manage—somehow— to come back across the threshold you crossed and still remember how much you like puppies.

* * *

"This is unethical, Michael. It's like cheating," Fiona hisses into her microphone as the heels of her festive fur-trimmed red shoes echo a rhythmic _clip-clop_ sound as she makes her way across the uneven concrete parking lot. Even through his Bluetooth headset, Michael can tell she is using her displeased walk, which is approximately two degrees below her angry walk and one degree above her irritated walk. The fact that she's displeased but not angry mitigates his guilt a little bit. It probably means that she'll forgive him. Eventually.

"Right there with you, sister," Sam grunts from beside her, pulling at the collar of his costume and generally looking uncomfortable as they round the corner of the building Michael is currently ensconced in the ventilation system of. "It's like using our powers for evil. This is the dark side of the force and the poor suckers in this parking lot have no idea what's about to hit them."

"These people have done nothing wrong," Fiona agrees. "And if you'd just taken care of this last month when I reminded you to, we wouldn't be in this mess," Fiona adds with a delicate sniff. And she is absolutely right. If Michael _had_ taken care of this target last month, they most definitely wouldn't be taking care of it _now_. Incidentally, a race riot between Neo-Nazis and Cubans last month in Little Havana might have also gotten out of hand if he'd been here handling this instead of over there handling that. Details.

Wisely, he doesn't bring that up though. When you're a spy, sometimes what you don't say is as important as what you do. Sometimes more important.

Instead, Michael takes a deep breath and counts backwards from five. "Look, you guys," he begins once he's done, tone apologetic in a long-suffering but incredibly sincere sort of way, "if I had any other choice you know I wouldn't ask you to do this. But this is the last shipment into the city. If we don't hit them now—_today_—there won't be another chance until _next month_ and by then we'll be too late." He winces just thinking about the consequences of being too late with this. "So if we just handle this now—without anymore complaining— there probably won't be blood, okay?"

"There might be blood either way," Fiona promises, as she and Sam arrive at the employee entrance to the mall.

"Uh guys? Tow truck's here," Jesse chimes in, clearly sensing a lover's quarrel brewing in the middle of this conference call and not wanting any part of it. He is currently standing in the middle of a freeway off-ramp about a mile south of the mall, upon which his car had implausibly broken down while in the middle of changing lanes. Currently, his smoking vehicle has clogged up the exit ramp for anyone hoping to get to the shopping center to make their last-minute Christmas Eve purchases. Jesse sounds admirably level about the whole thing, despite the various angry epithets being thrown at him from the many irate motorists currently stranded by his ploy. "I say you've got maybe ten minutes before the _real_ fake Mr. and Mrs. Claus arrive for work."

"Keep stalling," Michael tells him, not unreasonably. He says that because he knows that Jesse can do it. That makes it a reasonable request in his book.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Jesse. Mr. and Mrs. Claus are already here," Fiona says with forced cheer, before stopping to smile at the bored security guards waiting in front of the employee entrance. "Morning boys," she says with a fair facsimile of flirtatiousness and a suitably appreciative once-over of their uniforms despite the early morning hour. Michael imagines that at this point, the security guards are either staring at the curve of her trim, fur-lined cleavage or at the tan length of her legs that the short skirt on her Mrs. Claus outfit doesn't bother to hide in the mild Florida winter.

A spy uses any means necessary to distract and disorient an enemy. Great cleavage and shapely legs are, both of them, timeless strategies that never get old in that respect.

"Morning," Sam grunts to security as well, just surly sounding enough to pass as a long-term mall Santa and possible alcoholic. It is also very convincing, in its own way.

The security guards wave them both through without taking their eyes off of Fiona.

"In," Fiona reports to Michael unnecessarily, as the two of them head down the corridor towards the doors that will take them to the shopping center proper. What awaits them there is a grotesque Santa's Village display set up in front of the first floor of the Macy's. Coincidentally, right where Michael needs it to be.

"Two minutes," Michael reminds them, while in the background, he can hear Jesse explaining to the tow truck driver about how he refuses to pay that ridiculous service fee for one measly tow even though his AAA membership is expired two years running now.

"That's just bad customer service on Christmas Eve!" Jesse rails, while the blaring of horns and the shouting of angry last-minute Christmas shoppers plays in the background. Michael checks his watch again.

"Almost there guys," he encourages smoothly. "Doors open in one minute, thirty two seconds."

He waits while Fiona and Sam get into position at Santa's Workshop and Jesse gets towed off the exit ramp at the insistence of two very irate members of the Miami PD.

Then it's 9:00am sharp, and the doors to the mall open for the consumer horde on Christmas Eve morning.

The halls, predictably, erupt into chaos.

"They're rounding the corner, Fi," Michael announces as he hears the steady roar of the crowd fighting tooth and nail to get to the Toy Connection on the first floor before anyone else. This shipment only has two hundred units. From eyeballing the crowd, he estimates four hundred people. Some have been camped outside the mall as early as Monday morning, according to their surveillance of the premises.

Fiona huffs a sigh that means she doesn't know what she sees in Michael sometimes. "Yeah, I see them," she murmurs.

Then, right on cue, she promptly throws a sudden fit right in the middle of Santa's Workshop. "You filthy, drunken pig!" she shouts at the top of her lungs at Sam in his Santa suit, and grabs one of the oversized decorative presents lining the display. She hefts it over her head in a threatening manner.

"Hey, if you don't want me to touch, cover up the goods, sister!" Sam shouts back, weaving a little drunkenly.

Fiona shrieks in indignation and pitches the present at his head. Sam doesn't dodge and takes it right in the chest. Then, with an exaggerated grunt, he falls backwards, making it look like a drunken stumble.

He ends up slamming right into the large, festively lit tree behind him, with perhaps more force than his falling naturally would cause.

The tree goes toppling to the ground.

Right, as it so happens, into the path of the four hundred odd rabid housewives and harried fathers trying to make it to the Toy Connection before the most sought after children's gift in America is completely sold out in the Miami market. Again.

They are forced to detour around the blockage, shaving a precious thirty-three seconds off of their ETA and distracting them long enough not to notice the strange man slipping out of the vents and making his way around the narrow space behind Santa's Workshop.

From there, Michael casually walks a straight line path to the Toy Connection on the other side of the mall. He makes sure to smile disarmingly at a slightly bewildered looking pimply teen at the checkout line as he strolls right through the front entrance, alone.

He's in and out with the target in hand before those hapless civilians even know what hit them.

Michael doesn't feel particularly good about that, but it's a matter of life and death.

* * *

"Woaaaah!" Charlie exclaims as he rips right through the wrapping paper Michael had to shell out an extra twelve bucks to get done for him at Macy's yesterday. Beneath said wrapping paper is a Mr. Cuddles McSingalong the Robotic Rottweiler, the current hottest (and consequently, most expensive) toy in America. People have died on the news to get this thing. There have been fires set to homes and tales of neighbor turning on neighbor in the streets to procure this product for their loved ones. If Michael didn't know any better, he would say the whole thing is a brilliant ploy by Chinese intelligence to get America to destroy itself.

Whatever the case, people love it. Michael doesn't understand why, but then again, there's a reason why he's been trained _not_ to think like the majority of the American public.

The thing itself has a creepy blend of stuffed animal and robot qualities straight out of a B-grade horror movie, sporting two large, empty brown eyes and an electronic voice that sounds like it should belong to a pedophilic clown. According to the myriad auction sites Michael had been stalking for the better part of a week, Mr. Cuddles can also be programmed to address his owner by name and synchronizes to a special children's television show that airs every weekday morning at 6:00am. According to Nate, there are lots of songs on that television show. The label on the box says that Mr. Cuddles already comes preprogrammed with thirty-two.

Michael doesn't think any good can come of that. Though he is, admittedly, slightly gratified by the look of unadulterated joy on his nephew's face when he sees the gift he's received from his uncle this year. They can think about what this robot dog will cost them later, when they'll all undoubtedly want to bash in Mr. Cuddles' expensive little doggie head because Charlie constantly playing those thirty-two songs in the background is slowly driving them _insane_.

"Thank you, Uncle Michael!" Charlie shouts gleefully, running up to Michael and hugging sloppily at his left knee one-handed before dashing off on some mad five-year-old high of consumerist bliss. "I can't believe I got Mr. Cuddles!"

Michael looks sideways at his mother and his brother, both of whom are looking back at him with a healthy dose of pleased disbelief.

"You actually got it, Bro," Nate breathes. "I've been trying to find one of these for the last two _months_."

"Told you he'd get it," Madeline says around her cigarette. "Michael always finds a way with the right motivation."

Over the shoulders of the Westens, Fiona and Sam both give Michael significant looks over their mugs of Irish coffee. Michael is sure if Jesse were here instead of working, there would be a blatant unimpressed expression coming from him over the rim of his coffee as well.

When you're a spy, you know exactly how your team will react in any given situation ahead of time. Even when that reaction annoys you.

"I gotta admit," Nate says after a minute, pausing to glance fondly at his crazed offspring and his crazed offspring's strange affinity for very effectively shredding packaging, "I didn't think you'd remember after last year."

"You and me both," Madeline admits, pleasant and warm and not at all acting like she'd been the one calling for Michael's blood if he failed to get her precious only grandson exactly what he'd asked for this Christmas. Last year Charlie had asked his uncle for a race car track. Michael had managed to get him a baseball bat at the last minute, pried from the cold, unconscious hands of a former Dominican gang member and washed clean of blood. It had been a perfectly good bat.

And yet, Madeline had not been pleased.

"What? No. Of course I remembered," Michael says, in a totally convincing and innocent manner. This is the very same convincing and innocent manner that has worked on countless trained operatives across the former Soviet Union. It might also have been partially responsible for the collapse of the former Soviet Union, but Michael isn't allowed to acknowledge that. "I mean, he's only been talking about it—incessantly— for three months. There was no way I'd forget."

Half of his family is now looking suitably impressed with his accomplishments, at the very least.

The other half—that is, the half that is currently going through the Irish part of their Irish coffees a lot faster than is probably prudent for so early in the morning— are not so much impressed with his heroic feats as expecting compensation for being forced to cross a very distinct moral line in the name of Mr. Cuddles. Michael realizes he probably owes them their fill of dinner and drinks at the Carlito until _next_ New Year's. And not just the happy hour stuff either.

He'll take it, he supposes.

Because sometimes, when you're a spy, desperate forays to the dark side aren't so very bad when you know you'll always have someone to help drag you back into the light afterwards, just in time for terrifying robot puppies and Christmas with your family.

**END**


End file.
